2835: How To Get Stronger Than You've Ever Been

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“Salto Stefano, Adam Shafer, and Justin Andrews.”

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This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, how you can be the strongest you've ever been. You can pick a couple of lifts, follower advice in 90 days. Many of you are going to hit a new record in those lifts. By the way, we just launched a brand new program, Maps, PPL, push pull legs.

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All right. This is going to be a fun one. We're going to teach you today how you can get stronger than you've ever been in your entire life. We're going to give you specifics, follow these, and break your old records.

Let's go. I'm excited. I always be strong. Yeah.

“So first off, I think we should say, if you want to really measure this.”

If you really want to be stronger than you've ever been, I know people like you can think of general strength, but to measure it, you should pick a couple of lifts that you're going to focus on. That way you can objectively see, oh yeah, like these, I see myself getting much stronger. And pick two, big mistake people make when trying to gain strength, and you can generally

get stronger. But if you want to see your biggest gains in strength, you're better off picking a couple to focus on for a certain period of time. The biggest movers, the gross motor movements, the compound lifts, those ones are you really have to generate the most force I think is probably the best.

You know, we've said that before, and I was trying to think if there was ever a time where I saw multiple of my big lifts all go up at the exact same time, that's not very common. It isn't maybe one or two at the same time. You can, I mean, you definitely can, but let's say, especially someone who's relatively new.

If I want to make big gains in strength, if I focus on one lift, I'll make bigger gains in that one lift than if I focused on a lot of lifts, essentially when trying to say, yeah. And I think just for the purpose of this episode, you know, you could do what we're about to say for a good 90 days. And that should get you, a lot of people watching this, PRs in the lifts that they chose.

Although I will say that if you are, which a lot of people are coming off a layoff, been inconsistent, and then you follow the things that we're about to talk about, oh, it's a good general advice. Yeah, I mean, you're going to, you're going to probably see a lot of your lifts, but if not all their lifts.

Definitely. Now, here, okay. So here's one thing that's important. We'll focus on workout programming before we get to the other stuff, but because programming

makes a big difference, first of all, programming makes a big difference, makes a big difference

for building muscle, burning body fat, improving, you know, fitness, all that stuff. But it makes the biggest difference when it comes to objective strength games. If you look at strength training programming, the more focused it is on a strength sport, like power lifting, Olympic lifting, the more scientific it gets. Yeah.

Because it makes a huge difference in comparison to all the other things I said.

to a specific lift or set of lifts, it's more objective. Yes. It's pretty clear.

“By metrics, you can see movement in the right direction versus like, well, you don't”

really can't really pin it's one thing. That's right.

So the first point is, you want to do less variety of exercises and lifts.

And this is where you'll see a big difference between competitive strength sports and, let's say, like, overall bodybuilding or overall developing your body, like bodybuilding tends to have a lot of variety of exercises. When you look at strength sports or programming for like power lifting or Olympic lifting or a deadlift or squat or whatever, it's far less varied.

And the reason for that is a lot of people don't realize this, but definitely bigger muscles contract harder. That's true. But the skill involved in the lift is the biggest contributor to the amount of weight you can lift.

Your skill or that you develop around a specific lift, the better you get at performing that lift, the more weight you can lift. And this is really evident when you see someone who should not be lifting as much weight as they are. And you'll see them in the gym sometimes, like, I can't believe that guy just deadlift

at 600 pounds.

“The only way is, you know, 170 pounds, how's that possible?”

He's really skilled at that particular lift. Your reference to bodybuilding is a bit misleading and I say that because I've felt for this same exact trap of this idea that bodybuilding is a variety of all these different exercises and angles, and to it, instead it is from the outside looking in when you look at Mr. Olympia and you see in a magazine, his workouts and you see all these different exercises did.

But he didn't get that physique, not getting strong at squatting or developing, and so I fell for that trap. Like you went too far. Oh, man, and I think a lot of people do, I think, a lot of people that don't identify as a strength athlete or care about PRs or not interested in power lifting or Olympic lifting,

but they're very much so into building the best body that they could possibly build, right? Building the best version of themselves and you jump right into what are all these pro-bodybuilders doing and assume that that's the greatest pathway to build the best physique for you.

It's just not true, and every time we talk about this, it always frustrates me because

I made that mistake for a very long time. For a very long time, I was chasing all these novel exercises or unique angles or doing all this stuff that, sure, I built some muscle on the way, and I added a decent physique, but nothing built a stronger, better-looking, bigger physique than getting good at a couple of these good, major lifts.

Yeah, I will say, generally speaking, bodybuilding has more variety than let's say power lifting, power lifting, programming on its face looks very boring and simple in comparison. But that being said, for more Georgia people listening right now, if you're listening to this episode, you're like, yeah, I'd like to get really strong, but I also want to develop my legs or my delts, or my back, pick a lift that corresponds to that body part, get strong

at it, and you'll develop that body part. So if you're listening to this and you're a woman, you're like, I want to get my glutes to grow, apply where I'm about to say to the hip thrust or the barbell squat, and your butt will grow as you get stronger, so it's definitely even important. No, this is the argument I'm trying to make is that if you're a young man and you're in your

20s and you're like, I want to build the best physique possible, and you're following all these, you know, bodybuilder type of routines, you would be far better served following what

“work about the talk about for the most part, for the most part, if you want to build that”

the ultimate stage physique or the most ripped jacked version of you, and don't fall for the doing all these other creative exercises right now, because right now as you're in your early

20s and you are laying the foundation for this incredible physique you want to build,

this is the pathway, is to focus on a couple of the major lifts and practice them and get really good and get really strong at them, because it will carry over the most. And what you're saying is we can fall into. It's such an easy trip. I remember when Justin did his video series trying to hit a push press or split stance press with three 15 overhead, and I remember when you first, I remember as you followed the process, and obviously Justin knows

he's probably the best workout program in this room, he as he followed this process is programly became far more simple. Yeah, as you when we talk about that a little bit with like how the variety changed or reduced and how much stronger you got as a result. Oh yeah, like I realized quickly that

cast of muscle groups and to make sure I had the longevity to keep adding on this crazy amount

“of load and really just to peel back and take more rest and actually like take more emphasis on”

the recovery, but also the actual skill itself, like put the emphasis on the skill, so just like trade out all that volume, just put it right into just the specific lift itself, like my number start to really shoot up almost immediately. So here's the next part of this is take this lift or these two lifts that you're going to focus on for the next 90 days, and you're going to practice them by the way, I'm using that word intentionally, practice. You don't want to think in terms of

body parts when you're trying to get stronger, you want to think in terms of the movement,

but practice these lifts about twice a week. This is what the general consensus says about

getting strong at a particular lift is about two days a week is when you're kind of focusing on this particular lift. Now the workouts are not the same with those two times, so let's say your goal is to get your squat, you want your squat or let's say your bench press, I want to get that to its highest level, so I'm going to bench twice a week. You're not doing the same kind of bench pressing twice a week. Typically with the coaches will expouse and what you've seen in the data is

one day should be heavy and one day should be light and the light day you're focusing on speed of the lift and the heavy day you're just focused on lifting heavy. And when you do it this way,

you get really good and get really strong very, very quickly. The heavy day sounds quite obvious,

you got lift heavy, right? So if I'm trying to get strong to the bench press, I'm going to have a day where I'm getting underneath a bar that I can maybe do five reps with and I'm practicing two or

“three reps and I'm doing maybe six sets of this. Remember less variety of exercises, so I'm still”

doing a lot of sets, but it's like very few exercises. But then one day a week, I'm going to take a wait that I could probably lift 10 times and I'm doing one or two, but my goal is to see if I can throw it off my chest if I can really move this bar quickly. And that lightweight with speed has a great carryover to over a translate. Yeah. Well, again, it's another one of those things that if you think that you're focused on the aesthetics that, oh, this is like training like an athlete.

Why? Why would I do this? I'm most people in the greatest that I've been feeling. No, I mean, I'm going to keep hammering that home because I know that it's not just because I identify as that, I know that a lot of my clients did. Like it was rare that I had a client come to me and say that they wanted to get good, it explosive movements or they wanted to be, they wanted to get

“sure. Yeah, they wanted to hit a PR, they wanted to get sure. That's rare. Most people come because”

they want to look, and because of that, we make the mistake of limiting ourselves in our training program to this very generic kind of doing all these random exercises versus doing some of the major lifts really well. And part of doing the major lifts really well is one of the things you said is practicing them, but it impracticed them in different ways. Slow grinding controlled and then light and fast. Like that, doing those movements, I've been both those ways within

a training cycle such a strong tool for you to get really good to movement. Fast, which contraction is such a different stimulus, like it's something that different skill, different skill, it produces a different physique as well. It'll actually build muscle a little bit. If you're not getting that type of stimulus, you'll notice a visible difference. Yeah, absolutely. So one way to do this by the way for people who have the ability to do this is on the light day, on the fast light day,

you load the bar and then use a resistance band and anchor the resistance band. It works so well with the fast rep style lighter weight, you know, style training. This, I discovered this years ago trying to at the time, trying to hit a 600 pound deadlift at a body weight of 190 pounds. And I got stuck at like 570 for a while. And then I was reading, you know, you know, west side of the barbell training. And they did a lot of, they did this, right? And so I started

using bands. And what I did was I'd go 315, so at the time, if my one rep max was 570, 315 was relatively light, right? But I'd use bands, heavy bands on it. And I would just do one rep and I get, you know, and of course, if you're moving fast, by the way, make sure you got good technique, because then the risk of injury goes up. But I really focus on exploding up off the ground with the bands in 315. And that's how I got to 600 pounds was, was practicing that. Next is, you're going to

most people's goals. Definitely not for strength stuck with recovery track. In fact, if you took

“someone who was doing good programming 5 days a week, who had a nice physique, bodybuilder”

style physique, and they look good or whatever. They're like, I want to get really strong. You cut them down to 3 days a week and those get stronger. It's just across the board, it tends to work better that way. So you're doing 3 days a week of lifting and no more than that. Now, you're probably wondering, well, what's that extra day, right? Because you said one heavy day,

one light, what am I doing on that third day? That's when you're doing, and that's the next point,

exercises that are support. How do I support this movement? So if I'm getting good at the dead lift, I may do exercises for my lads. I may do exercises that work on hip stability, that work on rotation, because I know, or maybe QL strength, because I know that can be a weakness in the deadlift that can cause injury. If I don't have good rotation or good QL, that's one of the muscles that stabilizes the sides of your body with the deadlift. For the bench press, you know,

I'm going to do isometrics. I'm just going to ask you a view of you incorporate isometric. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm going to do stuff for shoulders. I'm going to do stuff. If it's a bench press, I'm going to do just rowing movements on that day to give me that nice anchor at the mid back,

“you know, for the bench press. And so that's what the other day is going to look like. So a lot of this”

workout is going to look like a lot of sets of this lift or two lifts that you're trying to build,

and then you're using these other exercises that's like the support. Like how does it going to support this particular lift? The big mistake people will make following our advice here is they do a lot of everything. So like, yeah, I want to get stronger. The bench press, but I'm going to make sure I hammer everything. You're not going to get even just hammering. So I'll just do it a lot of things. I mean, it's tough to get. I mean, obviously it depends on who we're talking to, right? If you're talking

to someone who, you know, goes to the gym, it's one thing. But a lot of people that listen to podcast are avid lifters. And so you take somebody who consistently already trains five days a week, and you give them the advice you're giving right now. It sounds like it's not enough. I don't know how many times we have to talk to either a live call or a person messaging in that needs help, and we're giving advice. And they want to see a deadlift go up. They want to see movement. And then you

assess their programming. And it's just like they're doing like a, like a maps aesthetic type of volume. And then on top of that, they're doing all this extra deadlifting and squatting or whatever movement is they're trying to get good at. And it's just way too much volume. It's way too much. If they would scale dramatically back and just focus on those one or two lives, they'd see a huge impact. And there's this fear that they all seem to have, which is they've been training that way

for so long that if I also didn't scale way back and all that, I'm going to lose all those gains that I had on those other muscles. And even though I really want to see my deadlift or I really want to see my squat or my really want to see my hip thrust go up, but I also don't want to lose my delts that I built in my chest that I built over the last five years. And it's like, it doesn't it won't work right now. You don't actually like that much. 90% of those people actually get progress.

Yeah, it's funny. It's often times we'll get, like you said, call or as we're doing this crazy five day week workout. And all we do is cut their volume in half. I don't even change their program. Just cut your volume in half, report back to me in six days and they all come back and I'm way stronger like this is crazy. So a lot is not a good idea. You want the right amount. And for most people listening, it's about three days a week for what we're talking about. And you're

using those other exercises to support the ones that you're focused on for the next 90 days. Now on those off, so three days a week, you take somebody who is used to lifting five, six walking

“mobility. I mean, keep your movement up. That's going to help facilitate recovery. So I think that's”

also important. Yeah, don't just sit around, right? Yeah, make sure you keep your steps up for sure. Lots of cardio would be counterproductive for this. Right, right. But movement is okay, right? Like movement, low intensity, walking, you know, low intensity, lift cool stuff, stuff that's going to keep the body active, doing mobility stuff, doing corrective movements to help better movement patterns. I think those are data are only going to support and facilitate recovery. Okay, now we're going

to get to the diet part. And it's very simple. Basically, I'm just going to make it as simple as possible. Whatever you're eating now at 500 calories. Right. So good. Now, you can just change your programming yet stronger, especially if your programming's not good. That's true. But you add an extra 500 calories a day to that and you've just turbocharged all your strength things. If you're in a calorie deficit, it ain't going to happen. If you're like, yeah, I love this. I'd

like to hit PRs and get shredded. Pick one. If you're not going to do both. So you got to pick which one you're after and then go after the energy. That's right. The extra calories alone. Here's

how powerful this is. Sometimes people just bump their calories against stronger. They're going

to change their workout programming. They just needed extra calories. So to make it simple for someone right now, look at your diet and then give yourself a 500 calorie meal that you throw in top of it

direction because my advice will feed into your next point you're going to make. Which I like just

“adding fatty or meat and two ounces to your meals. That's easy way to do it. So it's like”

because most people can afford to have higher protein. Right. Then what they're already currently on, I need their calories up. So it's like, okay, instead of us having those chicken breasts, we're having chicken thighs. Instead of us having, you know, extra lean ground beef, you're having the higher fat ground beef or you're getting rib eye or you know, try tip or something in there.

And instead of you always eating six to seven ounces, I'm having you eat at least eight to nine

ounces. And so you don't really have to change a lot of what you're currently doing or find a place to fit in the mill on it. It's like, you'll see bigger portions. Yeah, just eat a little bit larger portion of that meat when you when you do eat it and also enjoy a higher fat cut than you normally would. And that'll typically take care of those five hours. And that takes this the next point, which is eat high protein. What does high protein, a gram of protein

per pound of body weight? We've said that so many times in the podcast yet. Now I know the data shows, it's probably a little less than this or whatever, but here's what I know. I know that A, eating a little over that doesn't hurt and B, you're going to miss some days. So it's difficult to do consistently. That's right. So it's also a round number. Sometimes people are funny about this. Like, okay, 0.7 or 0.8 grams per pound of body weight comes out to whatever. Just whatever

over a math problem. Whatever you ate, you know, you're your body weight. And that's your really, really overweight in which case you don't eat that much protein. You'd want to go more towards target body weight. But if you're not super overweight, just whatever your body weight is, that's the grams of protein. Eat that daily. Now the difference between that amount of protein and let's say low protein, like with the RDA recommends, huge difference in strength gains.

You take 150 pound female who's used to eating 60 grams or 70 grams of protein a day and have her eat 150 grams of protein a day. Wow, what a difference when it comes to strength and muscle. And then finally, you want sleep. You got to have sleep. Poor sleep, it will kill all your progress dramatically increases your risk of injury. It's actually funny because the data shows that one of the greatest predictors of injury is a poor night asleep. It's even more of a predictor than

not warming up. So get really good sleep. And I like to tell people, aim for eight and a half hours

every night. So I know that everybody's like 78. But here's what happens, especially if you're more

towards a seven. You go, you're like, okay, cool. If I go to bed at 10, then I need to wake up at this time for seven hours. But it takes you 20 minutes to fall asleep. And the realities you're getting less than the amount. If you aim for eight and a half, like I go to bed at this time and eight and a half hours later, I'm waking up. That's my, my block. Then that 0.5 hours is you going to sleep and

“maybe if you have to wake up in the middle light to go peer whatever and you'll hit the ideal amount of”

sleep. Do you think you think part of why we see so much success in the people that reduce their volume of training to down to like three days a week versus their five or six is partly because of this also because I think it's really tough. For me, it is. I notice this because I'm tracking so diligently right now for such a long period of time. It's probably the longest I've ever tracked sleep and been like really consistently trying to improve. It's tough. Like I still,

so the new goal that I have for myself, and I keep setting these like new milestone goals, so if I can put a little bit better, a little bit better, I still have yet to do back to back 90s.

I hadn't seen a 90 score ever for a long time that I started seeing my first 90s and I get one

a week maybe, but I haven't been able to put back to back 90 like rest like that. I'm lucky if I get a 90 and then an 80 or something like that a lot of times you're 90. And so, you know, it's the consistency of getting, and it's so because I'm again paying attention so closely, you know, when I land in the 70s or 80s, if I wasn't really paying attention, I could easily misjudge what that was if someone asked me. I'm getting closer now to where it's like, oh, I can feel huge difference between a 90

slate sleep night and like say like a slow 70 sleep night. Like that discrepancy is a huge difference. I just, I feel so much better, so much, so much, so much more energy. And it's like,

“man, I can only imagine if I could just string three, four or five of those in a row. And so I think”

a lot of people probably can relate to this, not getting perfect sleep all the time. And so when you you throw that in with someone who's also training with high volume and intensity, you're just setting yourself up for having your body struggling to recover and perform. I know for me, good versus not great sleep is like a predictable 5% increase in weight, you could literally eat, you could predict whatever performance metric to add to that like consistency. And if I go back and

think about my best performances, either like sports related, you know, even when I had like a musical

a lot of, you hear a lot of tips around sleep. Here's the one that has a biggest impact. And I like to

“focus on the ones that have the biggest impact because if I give people 10 ways to improve your sleep,”

it just, it's just too much. Here's the biggest, biggest impact. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every day. That seems to translate into the best sleep scores and reports that we get from people is if they just do that right there. So just start there. Now there's lots of, you know, okay, no electronics and black, you know, black eye room, no caffeine. Of course, that's a sleep killer, passes certain point. But if you just go to bed and wake up at the same time every day

“for the next 90 days, that one change right there will improve your sleep significantly. By the way,”

we just launched a brand new maps program, maps, PPL. So it's maps, push, pull legs. And for the

first time ever, we need to ban in women's version. So the program is a little different. A little bit

lower body focus and glute focus for the women, them for the men. But it's the same split, same exercise, just the programming, the sets and the reps a little bit different. Now because it's a brand new program, we're launching it right now. And it's 40% off. It's go to mapsppl.com, use the code

“ppl. You get the price slashed by 40%. Also, if you sign up within the first few days of the launch,”

you can attend live coaching by one of the mine pump coaches. They're going to do three days of

coaching, breaking down things like nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, really to help you become more consistent and maximize your progress through the program. We also include a supplement schedule guide, which will be free with this program. Again, you can get all of that included 40% off mapsppl.com. The code is ppl. You can also find us on Instagram. It's mine pump media. We'll see that. Thank you for listening to mine pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body,

dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB SuperBundle at minepumpmedia.com. The RGB SuperBundle includes maps andabolic, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by South Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB SuperBundle is like having

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